"Elegy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It links Far things and near, not in unnatural chains, But in those true accords which still escape The plodding reason, yet unify the world. I caught some glimpses of this mystic power In verses of your own, that elegy On Tycho, and that great quatrain of yours— I cannot quite recall the Latin words, But made it roughly mine in ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... the repulse and subsequent success of, received by Pitt on the same day (note)—presentiment of death upon the mind of, i. 297; impromptu stanzas composed by, on the eve of the attack—Gray's Elegy quoted by, on his way to the Heights of Abraham, i. 298; last words and death of, i. 299; and Montcalm, joint monument erected to the memory of—biographical notice of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... consisted of an old shattered press and one small, worn-out font of English, which he was then using himself, composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose, before mentioned, an ingenious young man, of excellent character, much respected in the town, clerk of the Assembly, and a pretty poet. Keimer made verses too, but very indifferently. He could not be said to write them, for his manner was to compose them in the types ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... tombstone in the picturesque churchyard of Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was, I observe, written as long ago as 1838, so that it can be reproduced without much danger of hurting the feelings of those who may have known and loved the subject of this touching elegy. The name of the victim was Port, and the circumstances of his ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... latter class, consisting of his commentary on his consulship and his history of his own times, is altogether lost. Of the former, which consisted of the heroic poems Halcyone, Limon, Marius, and his Consulate, the elegy of Tamelastes, translations of Homer and Aratus, epigrams, etc., nothing remains, except some fragments of the Phaenomena and Diosemeia of Aratus. It may, however, be questioned whether literature ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Your elegy found me moderately impressible. Fortune has apparently always treated you like a spoiled child; were your misfortunes mine I should be delighted, and in your torment I should find a paradise. A disappearance afflicts you with agony. I ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... elegy he wrote was a bad mixture of ancient and modern thought as to substance, figures, and literary form, for the boy had just been dipping into classics at school, while he was by habit of mind a Puritan. His composition was one at which pagan god and Christian angel must have smiled had ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... because they had beautiful thoughts? this is surely too great a paradox to be borne. Rather, it is the fire within the author's breast which overflows in the torrent of his burning, irresistible eloquence; it is the poetry of his inner soul, which relieves itself in the Ode or the Elegy; and his mental attitude and bearing, the beauty of his moral countenance, the force and keenness of his logic, are imaged in the tenderness, or energy, or richness of his language. Nay, according to the well-known line, "facit indignatio versus;" not ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... not from his fall last year, but from a blow with a tennis-ball some years ago. The grief for the dead brother is affectedly great; the aversion to the living one as affectedly displayed. They cried about an elegy,(232) and added, "Oh, that it were but his brother!" On 'Change they said, "Oh, that ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... probable that this sad elegy would have continued for hours, had not a servant approached with letters, which he distributed, two to Arthur Mordaunt and one to Mr. Winterham. A close observer might have seen that two of the envelopes ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... the character of the English squire, in that fox-hunting county, with that of a perfect gentleman, a scholar, and a most admirable member of society. He was a poet, also, affecting the style of Cowley, who wrote an elegy upon his uncle, William Hervey, an elegy compared to Milton's 'Lycidas' in imagery, music, and tenderness of thought. The shade of Cowley, whom Charles II. pronounced, at his death, to be 'the best man in England,' haunted ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... brief interval between two of the chief visitations of the Black Death (1361 and 1369), and a few years earlier the poet of the "Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor. It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile (to be lost again before the year was out) for that interesting protege of the Plantagenets ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... human heart, that his genius enabled him to embellish truth, and to present it with all its graces and attractions to the understandings of all those who are endowed with an innate love of the beautiful. His pictures, like Gray's Elegy in a Country Church-yard, may with equal truth be said 'to abound in images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... said that the Northern elegies are less sweet or less thrilling in their grief than those of England in the kindred forms of verse. It is enough to think of Gudrun's Lament in the "Elder Edda," or of Sonatorrek, Egil Skallagrimsson's elegy on the death of his two sons. It was not any congenital dulness or want of sense that made the Sagas generally averse to elegy. No mere writer of Sagas was made of stronger temper than Egil, and none of them ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... bass, may be likened to a 'cello solo of a mildly bravura nature. (Note the fantastic accents on weak beats in measures 18, 22, 23, and 24.) In the third variation comes a complete contrast in mood; the key is changed to A-flat minor and the theme is transformed into an elegy, all its joy crushed out. The movement abounds in impassioned dissonances, always emphasized by sf marks, and the throbbing pulsations of the bass—in the second phrase—give a tragic intensity of feeling. With the fourth ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... country that does that for me," she replied. "I am not the same, I feel queer; besides I am never two days alike. To-day I have the air of a mad woman, and to-morrow shall be as grave as an elegy. I change with the weather, I don't know why. You see, I am capable of anything, according to the moment. There are days when I would like to kill people,—not animals, I would never kill animals,—but ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... followed the andante, not very new, with commonplace variations, and the feeble finale. Then they played more, at the request of the guests,—first an elegy by Ernst, and then various other pieces. They were all very well, but did not produce upon me a tenth part of the impression that the opening piece did. I felt light and gay throughout the evening. As for my wife, never had I seen her as she was that night. ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... his hair and spake, saying, "I am a descendant of Ali;" and he entered the city along with the caravan from Hijaz, saying, "I come a pilgrim from Mecca;" and he presented a Casidah or elegy to the king, saying, "I have composed it!" The king gave him money, treated him with respect, and ordered him to be shown much flattering attention; till one of the courtiers, who had that day returned from a voyage at sea, said, "I saw him on the Eeduzha, or anniversary of sacrifice at ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... parents almost as much as children, when we advised that a great deal of poetry should not be read by very young pupils; the labour and difficulty of explaining it can be known only to those who have tried the experiment. The Elegy in a country church-yard, is one of the most popular poems, which is usually given to children to learn by heart; it cost at least a quarter of an hour to explain to intelligent children, the youngest of whom was at the time nine years old, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... wonder and sneer at him; but amongst our little circle of friends we may be sure he found admiring listeners. The young General had the romance of a boy on many matters. He delighted in music and poetry. On the last day of his life he said he would rather have written Gray's Elegy than have won a battle. We may be sure that with a gentleman of such literary tastes our friend George would become familiar; and as they were both in love, and both accepted lovers, and both eager for happiness, no doubt they must have had many sentimental conversations together which would be ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ploughmen, the carpenters, the fox-hunting gentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join together in syllabling the sharp-cut words, which for ever slice asunder time and the broad-backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair and triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference, go trampling out of the windows any time ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Caroline puts on the air of a martyr; her submission is positively killing. On every occasion she assassinates Adolphe with a "Just as you like!" uttered in tones whose sweetness is something fearful. No elegiac poet could compete with Caroline, who utters elegy upon elegy: elegy in action, elegy in speech: her smile is elegiac, her silence is elegiac, her gestures are elegiac. Here are a few examples, wherein every household will find some ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... elegy on the death of two pigs, I am just now returned from eating a most excellent one with the most magnificent Donaldson. I wish you would explain to me the reason of my being so very hard-hearted as to discover no manner of reluctance at that innocent animal's being brought to table well roasted. ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... Characteristic Temperament of Nations Greek Particles Latin Compounds Propertius Tibullus Lucan Statius Valerius Flaccus Claudian Persius Prudentius Hermesianax Destruction of Jerusalem Epic Poem German and English Paradise Lost Modern Travels The Trinity Incarnation Redemption Education Elegy Lavacrum Pallados Greek and Latin Pentameter Milton's Latin Poems Poetical Filter Gray and Cotton Homeric Heroes in Shakspeare Dryden Dr. Johnson Scott's Novels Scope of Christianity Times of Charles I. Messenger of the Covenant Prophecy Logic of Ideas and ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Stew Barley Broth Calf's Heart The Christmas Pudding Apple Pie Lobster Salad Stewed Steak Green Pea Soup Trifle Mutton Chops Barley Water Boiled Chicken Stewed Duck and Peas Curry The Railway Gilpin Punch Elegy Punch The Boa and the Blanket Punch The Dilly and the D's Punch A Book in a Bustle Punch Stanzas for the Sentimental. Punch 1. On a Tear which Angelina observed trickling down my nose at Dinner-time 2. On my refusing Angelina a kiss under the Mistletoe 3. On my finding Angelina ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... from Persian nm, as to make it ridiculous to suppose that they sprang from the same root. We must confess," he adds, "that these researches are very obscure and uncertain, and you will allow, not so agreeable as an ode of Hafez, or an elegy of Amr'alkeis." In a letter, dated 1787, he says: "You will be surprised at the resemblance between Sanskrit ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... Young had just published his "Night Thoughts," Thomson, the poet and author of "The Seasons," and Isaac Watts had just passed away, Lord Littleton had written "The Conversion of St. Paul," Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" was being eagerly read by the people, Blackstone's famous "Commentaries on the Laws of England," had made a profound impression, Johnson had completed his "Dictionary" and Oliver Goldsmith was ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... forms of verse, also, is of high quality. In his dramas he inserted songs whose lyric sweetness is reminiscent of the similar songs of Fletcher. Early in his career he composed (in pentameter quatrains of alternate rime, like Gray's 'Elegy') 'Annus Mirabilis' (The Wonderful Year—namely 1666), a long and vigorous though far from faultless narrative of the war with the Dutch and of the Great Fire of London. More important are the three odes in the 'irregular Pindaric' form introduced by Cowley. The first, that to ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the story of the bygone? The elegy, too, comes to us as the last lamenting, sadly solemn swan-song of that glorious golden time. And, indeed, are not all poesies but various notes of that mighty diapason of Thought and Feeling, that has, through the ages, been singing itself ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... homily on the evanescence of human love and fame can scarcely be imagined: a face alive with moral personality and human charms, such as win and warm our stranger eyes, yet the name, subject, artist, owner, all lost in oblivion! To pause before an interesting but "unknown portrait" is to read an elegy as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... smiled upon you and flattery falls sweet on your ear, and you are in danger of forgetting the final end of all ambition read "Grays Elegy." ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... eyes and the ears of the world; whilst others, more worthy, perhaps, in all the elements of true greatness, are left unnoticed and unknown. This thought awakens my recollection of a stanza in Gray's 'Elegy.' It touches tenderly and beautifully upon the neglect and lack of appreciation often experienced by real beauty, virtue and ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... definite proof of the date of publication, however, is found in the fourth Eclogue. It contains a long poem called The towre of vertue and honour, which is really a highly-wrought elegy on the premature and glorious death, not of "the Duke of Norfolk, Lord High admiral, and one of Barclay's patrons," as has been repeated parrot-like, from Warton downwards, but of his chivalrous son, Sir Edward Howard, ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... Who adds to them but addeth chaff, Obscures with husks the golden grain. Not all the bards of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one simple phrase What were not rather loss than gain; That elegy so briefly fine, That epic writ in half a line, That little which so much conveys, Whose silence is a hymn of praise And throbs with ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... leave the general concern, To track our hero on his path of fame: He must his laurels separately earn; For fifty thousand heroes, name by name, Though all deserving equally to turn A couplet, or an elegy to claim, Would form a lengthy lexicon of glory, And what is worse still, a much ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... glories of empire, was to be sacrificed to the mad notion of petty "State Sovereignty," by a sworn band of desperadoes. How sad when other generations would ask, where is the Federal Government, to be answered only by poets, who would sing her elegy, as in the past they have sang that ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... Kasidah, Ode or Elegy rhymed couplets numbering more than thirteen: If shorter it is called a "Ghazal." I have not thought it ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... came to Philadelphia, in 1723, he was first employed by one Keimer, an eccentric genius, as a pressman, for he was then printing an elegy of his own composition, on the death of Aisquila Rose—and as he had but one small font of types, and used no copy, but composed the elegy in the press, he could not employ him in the composition. Keimer was a visionary, whose mind was frequently elevated above ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... an elegy, the first of the poems in Anna Seward’s “Poetical Works,” having reference to ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... culminates in a horrifying cupola, and is colored a discountenancing brown. The first glimpse of it reminded me of the poems of A.H. Clough, whose chief merit was to die and to offer thereby an occasion for a grave and twilit elegy by Matthew Arnold. Clough's life-work was a continual asking of the question, "Life being unbearable, why should I not die?"—while echo, that commonplace and sapient commentator, mildly answered, "Why?": and this was precisely the impression ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... imagined that the words of the anthem which his choristers were chanting had produced in him emotions too violent to be borne by an enfeebled body and mind. For that anthem was taken from the plaintive elegy in which a servant of the true God, chastened by many sorrows and humiliations, banished, homesick, and living on the bounty of strangers, bewailed the fallen throne and the desolate Temple of Sion: "Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us; consider and behold ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this conclusion without much thought. She composed an Ode to Despair, an Elegy to an Unhappy Woman, and a Triolet to Interfering Dukes, before her mind was made up. She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy grey and holding communion only with the birds and trees; a ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... Col under the protection of the young Laird, without any of the distresses, which Mr. Pennant, in a fit of simple credulity, seems to think almost worthy of an elegy by Ossian. Wherever we roved, we were pleased to see the reverence with which his subjects regarded him. He did not endeavour to dazzle them by any magnificence of dress: his only distinction was a feather ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... cured: but one is surprised to read further on that the three little children remained seven years in pickle, whereas it is usual to begin withdrawing the pieces of flesh from the tub, with a wooden fork, at the end of about six weeks. The text is explicit: according to the elegy, it was seven years after the crime that St. Nicolas entered the accursed hostelry. He asked for supper. The landlord offered ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... with intolerance of Pope. Cf. "Biographia Literaria," ch. 2: "I felt almost as if I had been newly couched, when, by Mr. Wordsworth's conversation, I had been induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray's celebrated Elegy. I had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the Elegy I had considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this day I can not read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm. At all events whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... and revenge, on the comedy of intrigue and disguises, on the romance with its strange happenings and its reuniting of long parted friends. Burns goes the same way to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of some original in the Scottish vernacular school. The elegy, the verse epistle, the satirical form of Holy Willie's Prayer, the song and recitative of The Jolly Beggars, are all to be found in his predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local poets of the south-west of Scotland. In the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... it would be easy to extend this already long list of selections from a by no means extensive collection of poems, the grand elegy on Donne. By this last the reproach of vain and amatorious trifling which has been so often levelled at Carew is at once thrown back and blunted. No poem shows so great an influence on the masculine panegyrics with which Dryden was to ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... did not say that The Spoon River Anthology was a new book, but that it was a new book from America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' People in England who heard of Main Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with the principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I practically identified the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... would do honour to the greatest name in our literature, but it proved incontestibly that Tickell, as a poet, was superior to the master whom he so loved and honoured. His reputation hangs upon this elegy, which Fox pronounced perfect.[34] The Prospect of Peace, which passed through several editions, had at one time a considerable reputation, not assuredly for its poetry, but because it appealed to the spirit ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... the inclined plane, the screw, the pulley, the wedge, and the lever. After two or three Sundays my class was largely increased, for the children keenly enjoyed their competitive examinations. I would also give them bits of poetry to get by heart for the following Sunday - lines from Gray's 'Elegy,' from Wordsworth, from Pope's 'Essay on Man' - such in short as had a moral ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... and Andromache Amalia A Funeral Fantasie Fantasie—To Laura To Laura at the Harpsichord Group from Tartarus Rapture—To Laura To Laura (The Mystery of Reminiscence) Melancholy—To Laura The Infanticide The Greatness of the World Fortune and Wisdom Elegy on the Death of a Young Man The Battle Rousseau Friendship Elysium The Fugitive To Minna The Flowers The Triumph of Love (A Hymn) To a Moralist Count Eberhard, the Groaner of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... minor importance I owe to contemporary pamphlets in verse and prose. Such are the Bloody Assizes the life and Death of George Lord Jeffreys, the Panegyric on the late Lord Jeffreys, the Letter to the Lord Chancellor, Jeffreys's Elegy. See also Evelyn's Diary, Dec. 5, 1683, Oct. 31. 1685. I scarcely need advise every reader to consult Lord Campbell's ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 'specially with the ladies. Some of 'em would poke him with their fingers to see if he was real or only a kind of a stuffed figure like they burn in elegy. And when he'd move they'd squeak, and make eyes at him as they went up to the slosh. He looked fine in his halberdashery. He slept at $2 a week in a hall-room on Third Avenue. He invited me up there one night. He had a little book on the washstand that he read instead of shopping ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... "religion's," "Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good fortune. And yet we know that Paradise Lost is a greater work than this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's own elegy. There is ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... so critically said that Beaumont and Fletcher never wrote anything of the kind more lovely. Herrick, of course, lives simply by virtue of his songs; his more ambitious or pretentious lyrics are merely magnified and prolonged and elaborated songs. Elegy or litany, epicede or epithalamium, his work is always a song-writer's; nothing more, but nothing less, than the work of the greatest song-writer—as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist—ever ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751). (Facsimile of first edition and of portions of Gray's manuscripts ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... helter-skelter scholars, and the whole yelling mass precipitated, many of them headlong, among the snow. Well do we know the fire-eyed Poet pedagogue, who, more outrageous than Apollo, has "ravished all the Nine." Ode, elegy, epic, tragedy, or farce—all come alike to him; and of all the bards we have ever known—and the sum total cannot be under a thousand—he alone, judging from the cock and the squint of his eye, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878) brings the work of this decade to a close.[119] La Saisiaz, the record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary clamber to the summit of Saleve after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith, is not an elegy, but it remains with us as a memorial of friendship. In reading it we discern the tall white figure of the "stranger lady," leaning through the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloom, or pacing that low grass-path which she had loved and called her own. It serves Browning's ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy which begins thus:— ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... doomed to the wretched lot of orphans. See, arms have been sculptured on this tomb, though it belongs to a woman: but the daughters of heroes may have their monuments adorned with the trophies of their fathers; what a beautiful union is that of innocence and valour! There is an elegy of Propertius which paints better than any other writing of antiquity, this dignity of woman among the Romans, more imposing, more pure than the worship paid to them during the age of chivalry. Cornelia, dying in her youth, addresses to ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... received his hand, as he read, was wont to trace Polish proverbs, Polish turns of phrase. Tears were seen to rise to his eyes as, gazing at the beautiful panorama from a favourite spot of his in the Jura, a French friend recited Arnault's elegy on the homeless and wandering leaf, torn from the parent oak, in which the Pole read the story of his own exile. Education of the lower classes, for which he had already made so strong a stand, continued to be one of the matters in which he most keenly interested himself. During his stay in ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... marvelled what 'HOWQUA,' which was inseparable from these inscriptions, could mean. It was the name of the great Hong merchant, 'the friend of Americans,' who died recently at Canton, at an advanced age, leaving his vast wealth to two sons. Here is an elegy written upon his death by his brother-merchant TINGQUA, which is now being sung about Canton to a dolorous air, accompanied by the yeih-pa and the tchung, a curious sort of guitar and harp in common use. The elegy ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... read parts of Homer, parts of Thucydides, parts of Tacitus, parts of the tragedians, at school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal pomp of history, the gorgeous and philosophic mystery of the old dramatic fables. Never before had he learnt to gaze on "the bright countenance of truth, in the mild and dewy air of delightful studies." Those who decry classical education, do so from inexperience ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... person visits that consecrated ground who has not reaped enjoyment from the labors of that man's life. And as the simple epitaph meets the eye, and is read in an audible tone, the heart-felt invocation, "Blessings on his memory!" is his oft-repeated elegy. ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Longer than it was wont, this side the plain, Belike they mean, since my best friend must die, To shed their silver drops as he goes by. Not all this day here, nor in coming hither, Heard I the sweet birds tune their songs together, Except one nightingale in yonder dell Sigh'd a sad elegy for Philocel. Near whom a wood-dove kept no small ado, To bid me, in her language, 'Do so too'— The wether's bell, that leads our flock around, Yields, as methinks, this day a deader sound. {275} The little sparrows which in hedges creep, Ere I was up did seem to bid me weep. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection. The most famous English example begins ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the sun, so when sublimity sheds its light round the sophistries of rhetoric they become invisible".[1] What Longinus says of "sublimity" is equally true of sincerity and truthfulness in combination with exquisitely harmonious expression. We have an illustration in Gray's 'Elegy'. Nothing could be more artificial than the style, but what poem in the world appeals more directly to the heart and to the eye? It is one thing to call art to the assistance of art, it is quite another thing to call art to the assistance ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... and hoped through a dreary twelvemonth. With the ripe autumn closed the quiet struggle; and "in the bleak December" the mortal remains were followed from the temple where his youth worshipped, to the snow-clad knoll at Greenwood; garlands and tears, the ritual and the requiem, eulogy and elegy, consecrated the final scene. By a singular coincidence, the news of his decease reached the United States simultaneously with the arrival of the ship in James River with the colossal bronze statue of Washington, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... store Heaven could scarce give or we desire he more; But yet, alas! he's dead! Mourn, England, mourn, And all your scarlet into black cloth turn; Let dust and ashes with your tears comply. To weep, not sing, his mournful elegy; And let your love to Charles be shown hereby In rendering James your prayers and loyalty. Long may Great James these kingdoms' sceptre sway, And may his subjects lovingly obey, Whilst with joint comfort all ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... for him, she took him to a hotel, engaged a room, and sent for a doctor. In a few hours Raoul was out of danger; but the countess did not leave him until she had obtained a general confession of the causes of his act. When he had poured into her heart the dreadful elegy of his woes, she said, in order to make ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... bluebells now, her voice a bird, And the long sighing grass her elegy; She who a woman was is now a star In the high heaven ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... may have been in hiding under straw, when this disgrace befell me, or he may have noted that I was too raw and young an Atlas to carry the first-class Family Mansion in a knowing manner. Be this as it may, the Beadle did what Melancholy did to the youth in Gray's Elegy—he marked me for his own. And the way in which the Beadle did it, was this: he summoned me as a Juryman on his ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... very curious Armenian elegy on the fall of Constantinople, translated by M. Bore, in the Journal Asiatique for March, 1835; and by M. Brosset, in the new edition of Le Beau, (tom. xxi. p. 308.) The author thus ends his poem: "I, Abraham, loaded with sins, have composed this elegy ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... several that are marked by fancy and feeling, and a graceful versification, of one of which, an elegy, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... on my life," Raphael answered. "If your friendship is not strong enough to bear with my elegy, if you cannot put up with half an hour's tedium for my sake, go to sleep! But, then, never ask again for the reason of suicide that hangs over me, that comes nearer and calls to me, that I bow myself before. If you are to judge a man, you must ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... feeling of the poets, also, attaching itself with tenderness to graceful scenes of country life. Tito Strozza, about the year 1480, describes in a Latin elegy the dwelling of his mistress. We are shown an old ivy-clad house, half hidden in trees, and adorned with weather-stained frescoes of the saints, and near it a chapel, much damaged by the violence of the river Po, which flowed hard by; not far ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of those fortunate bards who obtain fame and honor during life. His learning was deep, his reading extensive, his acquaintance with mankind large. "To him," says Denham in his famous elegy, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... knowledge, tradition and personal interviews, were all laid under contribution by the author, and served as sources of his authority. These he has woven together with such judgment in selection, skill in arrangement and force of style and diction, that just as "Gray's Elegy" alone has placed him in the front rank of poets, so this one work has given the author a high and permanent place among the historians of our country. The work attempted is so well done, and withal so accurate and reliable ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... was bright; and the general, under the clear starlight, visited his stations, to make his final inspection and utter his last words of encouragement. As he passed from ship to ship, he spoke to those in the boat with him of the poet Gray, and the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' "I," said he, "would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow;" and, while the oars struck the river as it rippled in the silence of the night air under ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... at a great age, and her elegy over her coffin were these words from himself: "Here lies my dear faithful, pious, prudent, prayerful wife. I shall go to her, but she ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Venus and Adonis and dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton. In the composition of this poem Shakespeare undoubtedly worked from Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. He prefixed to the poem two lines from Ovid's fifteenth Elegy: ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... Quick Lunch Room The Hemp Poor Devil! Ghosts of a Lunatic Asylum The White Peacock Colors A Minor Poet The Lover in Hell Winged Man Music The Innovator Love in Twilight The Fiddling Wood Portrait of a Boy Portrait of a Baby The General Public Road and Hills Elegy for ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... English poets who sang the praise of tea: English poets were in those days an unknown quantity in French education, and especially in New France until after the conquest. But Wolfe opened the great world of English poetry to Canada as he recited Gray's Elegy with its prophetic line,— ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... which, announcing the death of a person called Partridge, once a shoemaker, but at the time the conductor of an Astrological Almanack, led to a controversy, which was supported with great humour by Swift and other wags. I believe you will find that this, with Swift's Elegy on the same person, is one of the last occasions in which astrology has afforded even a jest to the good people ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... strengthens an affirmation or denial by throwing it into the form of a question. It is a figure frequent in poetry and emotional prose. The following example from Gray's "Elegy" will be ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... opinion that only a very small part of any man's writings is really immortal. Take out the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and how much is left of Gray for other generations to admire? And so of Goldsmith: besides the "Vicar of Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village," there is little in his writings that is likely to prove immortal. Johnson wrote but little poetry ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... remarkable cleanliness of those I had left behind me." Yet, in spite of these superior attractions, he never recrossed the Atlantic; for his Joanna died soon after, and his promising son, being sent to the father, was educated in England, became a midshipman in the navy, and was lost at sea. With his elegy, in which the last depths of bathos are sadly sounded by a mourning parent,—who is induced to print them only by "the effect they had on the sympathetic and ingenious Mrs. Cowley,"—the "Narrative of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... Fawn Andrew Marvell On the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes Thomas Gray Verses on a Cat Charles Daubeny Epitaph on a Hare William Cowper On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch William Cowper An Elegy on a Lap-Dog John Gay My Last Terrier John Halsham Geist's Grave Matthew Arnold "Hold" Patrick ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... the elegy, sir, fairly enough; I find no fault with your interpretation. What I mean is this: Are you not ashamed to ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... but lay ill of the stone, which may justly bear the blame for what was left undone. I admire the industry of the general, and the bravery of the soldiers for what they succeeded in. Euripides, after their ruin and disaster, writing their funeral elegy, said that ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... circumstance to any tragic or dramatic purpose, as might be expected from an idyllic or elegiac poet who should suddenly assume the buskin of tragedy. Let us suppose that Moschus, for example, on the strength of having written a sweeter elegy than ever before was chanted over the untimely grave of a friend and fellow-singer, had said within himself, "Go to, I will be Sophocles"; can we imagine that the tragic result would have been other than tragical indeed for the credit of his gentle ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the Reverend John. "I've seen McTurk being hounded up the stairs to elegise the 'Elegy in a Churchyard,' while Beetle and Stalky went ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... attachment, nor could conceive why my name should affect her at such a time. I knew nothing of her illness, being at Harrow and in the country, till she was gone. Some years after, I made an attempt at an elegy—a very ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... altars.—Ver. 480. The 'sepulchralis ara' is the funeral pile, which was built in the form of an altar, with four equal sides. Ovid also calls it 'funeris ara,' in the Tristia, book iii. Elegy xiii. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... divers efforts made to conceal their rent breeches and dirty linen; nay, he could distinguish by their countenances the different kinds of poetry in which they exercised the muse. He saw Tragedy conspicuous in a grave solemnity of regard; Satire louring in a frown of envy and discontent; Elegy whining in a funeral aspect; Pastoral dozing in a most insipid languor of face; Ode-writing delineated in a distracted stare; and Epigram squinting with a pert sneer. Perhaps our hero refined too ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... in the moonlight with the soft heartbeat just felt through the folds of muslin and broadcloth! But it takes very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover. There are a great many cruel things besides poverty that freeze the genial current of the soul, as the poet of the Elegy calls it. Fire can stand any wind, but is easily blown out, and then come smouldering and smoke, and profitless, slow combustion without the cheerful blaze which sheds light all round it. The one Reader's hand may shelter the flame; the one blessed ministering spirit ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... escort the stalwart young Memon bridegroom unto the house of the bride. Thus is it ever in this city of strange contrasts. Life and Death in closest juxtaposition, the hymn in honour of the Prophet's birth blending with the elegy to the dead. Bag-pipes are not unknown in the Musalman quarters of Bombay; and not infrequently you may watch a crescent of ten or twelve wild Arab sailors in flowing brown gowns and parti-coloured head-scarves ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... the magnificence of the Pope and Cardinal Caesar, whom, in his verses on the Borgia Steer, he described as his greatest benefactor. Apparently he was also the author of the elegy on the death of the Duke of ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... been at all times extravagance and credulity itself. They looked upon this young villain as a martyr, and at once dedicated an elegy to him, in which I was compared ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... from Berlin to Braunschweig and around to Leipzig. While the songs repay study, they are rather marked by a pianistic meditation than a strictly lyric emotion. "Aufmunterung zur Freude" is a tame allegretto; "Wehmuth" is better; "Taeuschung" is a short elegy of passion and depth; "Ruhe in der Geliebten" is best in its middle strain where it is full of rich feeling and harmony. The ending is cheap. "Der gefangene Saenger" is only a slight variant at first on the "Adieu" credited to Schubert; ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... some of Sir Philip Sidney's work. There is no irreverence in it. Nor can I take it as any sign of hardness that Raleigh should treat the visual image of his own anticipated death with so much coolness, if the writer of a little elegy on his execution, when Raleigh was fourteen years older than at the presumed date of the foregoing verses, describes him truly ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... had appeared Gray's "Elegy," Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle," Fielding's "Amelia" and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." Here was menu to fit most palates, and the bill-of-fare was duly discussed in all social gatherings of the upper circles. The afflicted ones fed on Gray; the repentant quoted Richardson; while ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... on 16 June—to Miss Clairmont, then in Florence. It contains expressions to nearly the same purport. 'I have received a most melancholy account of the last illness of poor Keats; which I will neither tell you nor send you, for it would make you too low-spirited. My Elegy on him is finished. I have dipped my pen in consuming fire to chastise his destroyers; otherwise the tone of the poem is solemn and exalted. I send it to the press here, and you ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... and woman, in which they could find the echo of their own souls, and perhaps comfort and relief. The first movement expressed the grave and simple happiness of a loving young couple, with its tender sensuality, its confidence in the future, its joy and hopes. The second movement was an elegy on the death of a child. Christophe had avoided with horror any effort to depict death, and realistic detail in the expression of sorrow: there was only the utter misery of it,—yours, mine, everybody's, of being face ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... "Leading Facts of American History," in this series, S142. [2] "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour; The paths of glory lead but to the grave." Gray, "Elegy" (1750) "I would rather be the author of that poem," said Wolfe, "than to have the glory of beating the French to-morrow." Wolfe and Montcalm were both mortally wounded and died within a few ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... reign of Henry I. The custom was still observed in many places, and we often heard the sound of the curfew bell, which was almost invariably rung at eight o'clock in the evening. The poet Gray commences his "Elegy written in a ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... strange that the books generally give space to a mention of Urian Oakes, President of Harvard College, and to quotations from the crude and lengthy elegy which he published in 1667; and print examples from the execrable versified version of the Psalms made by the New England divines, and yet deny a place ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... shining yonder at the end of the street—and so vast that all bargaining is below it, and they may inherit it without considering their deserts.' I believe this to be strictly and equally true of the appeal which Poetry makes to each of us, child or man, in his degree. As Johnson said of Gray's "Elegy," it 'abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' It exalts us through the best of us, by telling us something new yet not strange, something that we recognise, something that we too have known, or surmised, but had never ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... account which the poet gives to Moore of his early poems, he says little about his exquisite lyrics, and less about "The Death and dying Words of Poor Mailie," or her "Elegy," the first of his poems where the inspiration of the muse is visible; but he speaks with exultation of the fame which those indecorous sallies, "Holy Willie's Prayer" and "The Holy Tulzie" brought from some of the clergy, and the people of Ayrshire. The west ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... poet, the one with his cheerfulness, the other with his mild melancholy, brings home, conceives the horror of the situation; the one treats the tragic in the spirit almost of burlesque, the other entirely in the spirit of elegy. So, again, with the novel writers: these professional retailers of anecdotes will pick up any subject to fill their volumes. In default of pleasant stories of filthy intrigue or lewd jest, men like Cinthio and Bandello will gabble off occasionally some tragic story, picked ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... "consciousness of self." It waked me to new ideas of duty and destiny, to wondrous thoughts and aspirations; and they would not down at my bidding. Over and over again I tried to banish them, but the inward and spiritual ear was open, and the sad strains of Schubert's "Elegy of Tears," and "The Wanderer," and the "Ave Maria," seemed my sorrow, my wanderings and my prayers. Sadness was not my nature; I was as cheerful as the bird that sings, save a mighty something which clung to me and overshadowed me like the enormous ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... especially, that the Italians come nearer to them; perhaps, because they are more proper than others to refine on pleasure. This is the character of the nation, of the truth of which I shall give no other proof than the last lines of an elegy, written by Samazarius, a Neapolitan gentleman." The sense of which in English ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... celebrated as a naval engineer. Then came Robert, the most attractive of the boys. A splendid athlete, compared by Anthony with a Greek statue, he had sweetness as well as depth of nature. His drawings of horses were the delight of his family; and when his favourite hunter died he wrote a graceful elegy on the afflicting event. The influence of his genial kindness was never forgotten by his youngest brother; but there was a stronger and more dominating personality of which the effect was less beneficial to ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... exile's chance acquaintances was a sparrow, whose elegy he also sings, comparing the bird to Lesbia's sparrow, much to the latter's disadvantage. All of Herrick's geese were swans. On the authority of Dorothy King, the daughter of a woman who served Herrick's successor at Dean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet kept a pig, which he ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... element. This is true only in a limited sense. It is true that the Puritan element in the Horton series of poems becomes more patent as we pass from the two lyrics to the mask of Comus, and from Comus to the elegy of Lycidas, just as, in the corresponding periods of time, the evils connected with the reign of Charles I. and with Laud's crusade against Puritanism were becoming more pronounced. But we can hardly regard Milton as having expressed any new decision in Comus: ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... unfortunate sovereign; narratives—sufficiently contemptuous of the present possessors of power; and chansons—some gay, and some touching—made us all forget the flight of time. Among their military choruses was one which drew tears from many a bold eye. It was a species of brief elegy to the memory of Turenne, whom the French soldier still regarded as his tutelar genius. It was said to have been written on the spot ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... looking up the church which gave rise to Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," intending when we got there to have a little scene over it; Mr. S., in all the conscious importance of having been there before, assuring us that he knew exactly where it was. So, after some difficulty with our coachman, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... soon after my seventh birthday, I have no copy, and only a very confused memory: but I remember that my good mother treasured for years and showed to many friends something in the nature of an elegy which a broken-hearted little brother wrote on the death of an infant sister from his first school: this is only mentioned in case any one of my older readers may possibly supply such a lost MS. in a child's roundhand. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... in the expectation of your manners not to exact them: if you do, he wonders at your ill breeding, that cannot distinguish betwixt what is spoken and what is meant. No man gives better satisfaction at the first, and comes off more with the elegy of a kind gentleman, till you know him better, and then you know him for nothing. And commonly those most rail at him, that have before most commended him. The best is, he cozens you in a fair manner, and abuses you with ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Miscellanies, brings charges of extreme penuriousness against him, but of his generous treatment of contemporary writers there is abundant testimony. His only works published during his lifetime were four poems, one of which is the elegy on Sidney which appeared in The Phoenix Nest (1593), and the Tragedy of Mustapha. A volume of his works appeared in 1633, another of Remains in 1670, and his biography of Sidney in 1652. He wrote two tragedies on the Senecan ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Lutheran sect, which was then spreading far and wide." Two years of penury followed; and then three years of school-mastering in the College of St. Barbe, which he has immortalised—at least, for the few who care to read modern Latin poetry—in his elegy on "The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the Humanities." The wretched regent-master, pale and suffering, sits up all night preparing his lecture, biting his nails and thumping his desk; and falls asleep for a few minutes, to ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of French poetry they would substitute reproductions or re-creations of classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as epiceries; and their place is to be taken by odes like those of Pindar or of Horace, by the elegy, satire, epigram, epic, or by newer forms justified by the practice of Italian masters. Rich but not over-curious rhymes are to be cultivated, with in general the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes; the caesura is to fall in accordance with the meaning. Ronsard, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... sea-life, of seamen, and of sea-slang, is generally attributed to the instructions of his brother, the master of a ship. This brother was subsequently lost at sea, and Dibdin is said to have written Poor Tom Bowling as his elegy. Dibdin's sea-lore was, therefore, altogether second-hand and theoretical; and his songs, on the whole, present an idealised and exaggerated embodiment of the characteristics, life, and habits of seamen; but it is wonderful how accurately ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... least, prevent her image from being enshrined in my heart. No, Julia! even when thou descendest to the grave, thy remembrance will cause thee to live in my imagination, and I shall thus write thine elegy: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... specimen of Elizabethan "Billingsgate" that has come down to us. It was a versatile pen that could turn from passages like these to the epic narrative of the duel, or Tamyra's lyric invocation of the "peaceful regents of the night" (II, ii, 158), or Bussy's stately elegy upon himself, as he dies standing, propped on his ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... at Eton, and seeing the boys out playing cricket; had an excellent opportunity to think how true Gray's poem on the Prospect of Eton is to boy-nature then, now, and forever. We were bent upon looking up the church which gave rise to his Elegy in a Country Churchyard, intending, when we got there, to have a little scene over it; Mr. S., in all the conscious importance of having been there before, assuring us that he knew exactly where it was. So, after some difficulty with our coachman, and being stopped at one ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the presence of the woman of the world. D'Arthez was dumbfounded. In his eyes convicts sent to the galleys for murder, or aggravated robbery, or for putting a wrong name to checks, were saints compared to the men and women of society. This atrocious elegy, forged in the arsenal of lies, and steeped in the waters of the Parisian Styx, had been poured into his ears with the inimitable accent of truth. The grave author contemplated for a moment that adorable woman lying back in her easy-chair, her two hands pendant from its arms like dewdrops ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... shakes his head at Tom Moore; but Pope is his especial favourite; and if anything in verse has his heart, it is the "Rape of the Lock." Peter Pindar he partly dislikes, but Anstey, the "Bath Guide," is high in his estimation; and with him "Gray's Odes" stand far above those of Collins'. Of the "Elegy in a Country Church" he thinks, as he says, "like the rest of the world." "Shenstone's Pastorals" he has read. Burns he praises, but in his heart thinks him a "wonderful clown," and shrugs his shoulders at his extreme popularity. He says as little about Shakespeare as he can, and has by heart ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... 8 from foot. "Sweet assurance of a look." A favourite quotation of Lamb's (here adapted) from Matthew Roydon's elegy ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... glance Conceitedly on Tania fair, And views amongst themselves advance Unfavourable unto her. But one buffoon unhappy deemed Her the ideal which he dreamed, And leaning 'gainst the portal closed To her an elegy composed. Also one Viazemski, remarking Tattiana by a poor aunt's side, Successfully to please her tried, And an old gent the poet marking By Tania, smoothing his peruke, To ask her name the ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Gray's Elegy.—I do not remember to have seen noted the evident Lucretian origin ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... my elegy shall sing, For elegy has other subject none; Each strain of music in my ears shall ring Knell of departure from that ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... in Gray's Elegy had not prepared me for a whole forest of yews, and I had never imagined them of the vastness I beheld. The place had its peculiar gloom through the church-yard associations of the trees, but there was a rich, Thomas Hardyish flavor in the lawless fact that in times when it was less ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Myvyrian Archaiology, v. 1, p. 71, is printed an Elegy on Cunedda, the work of one who had actually partaken of his royal munificence, who had received from him "milch cows, horses, wine, oil, and a host of slaves." The writer with respect to the martial prowess of his ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... not the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the Old World seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory has been kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of which is ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... may well have survived that event forty years or more. The only apparent indication of a still later composition of the book is that found in the reference to the book of Jasher, chap. 10:13. From 2 Sam. 1:18, we learn (according to the most approved interpretation of the passage) that David's elegy on the death of Saul and Jonathan was written in the book of Jasher. But we are not warranted in affirming that this title was applied to a book of definitely determined contents. It may have been a collection of national songs, enlarged from age ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... life. But before I touch on these, which, with Prospice, are the most important and impressive of the remaining poems, I should name the two or three lesser pieces, the exquisite and pregnant little elegy of love and mourning, May and Death; A Face, with its perfect clearness and fineness of suggestive portraiture, as lovely as the vignettes of Palma in Sordello, or as a real picture of the "Tuscan's early ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... are at all times interesting, if not constantly reliable. After a reading of Gray's "Elegy" by a fourth standard class, the boys were asked what was meant by "fretted vaults," and one youth replied—"The vaults in which these poor people were buried; their friends came and fretted over them." Asked what he understood by "Elegy," ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... an elegy to James A. Garfield, 20th President of the United States, who died on September 19, 1881, from a gunshot wound received in an assassination attempt in July ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... else as well. In these days he got dead drunk on oatmeal porridge, while he produced a perishing ecstasy on bread and milk. But of genuine intoxication the pennyworth of gin and water that sustained the immortal Elegy was his ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... least, Alfred de Vigny was a true innovator, in the broadest and most meritorious sense of the word: he was the creator of philosophic poetry in France. Until Jocelyn appeared, in 1836, the form of poetic expression was confined chiefly to the ode, the ballad, and the elegy; and no poet, with the exception of the author of 'Moise' and 'Eloa', ever dreamed that abstract ideas and themes dealing with the moralities could be expressed in the melody ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... There was an old damaged press, on which Franklin exercised his skill in repairing, and a small worn-out font of type. Keimer himself, who seems to have been a grotesque compound of knave and crank, was engaged at once in composing and setting up in type an elegy on the death of a prominent young man. He is the only poet to my knowledge who ever used the composition-stick instead of a pen for the vehicle of inspiration. The elegy may still be read in Duyckinck's ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... long summer days? Away, in the smooth "Flying Dutchman"; past Windsor's glorious towers and Eton's playing-fields; past the little village and churchyard where a century and a half ago the famous "Elegy" was written, and where, hard by "those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade," yet rests the body of the mighty poet, Gray. How those lines run in one's head this bright summer evening, as from our railway carriage we note the great white dome of Stoke House peeping out amid the ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs |
